Portland must take a new look at its priorities to solve its budget problems

Yes, Portland is experiencing a budget crisis. But because Americans have notoriously short memories, we should remember just how we got into this budget crisis in the first place. It wasn't because public workers' wages were too high, pensions too generous, or health care plans too expensive. It wasn't because we have too many parks, too many bus lines, too many school teachers, too many road maintenance crews.

No, we are facing a budget crisis in the city of Portland for the same reason virtually every other city and state in this country is facing a budget crisis: In 2008, investment bankers and hedge fund CEOs drove this country into the biggest, most prolonged, most severe economic crisis we've seen since the Great Depression.

After bankrupting their own institutions, they demanded a bailout from the American taxpayers, claiming they were too big to fail. And they got bailed out -- with hundreds of billions of our hard-earned dollars -- adding to the very deficit the "fiscal hawks" in Congress are now using as an excuse to cut support for the state and city level services working families depend on.

In the wake of the Wall Street meltdown, Main Street banks and businesses went under, workers lost their jobs, cities and states lost their tax base. Now we have entered what cynical economists are calling a "jobless recovery." Wall Street CEOs are once again earning millions of dollars -- but working people are still unemployed, or so underemployed that they can't pay their mortgages, their health care costs or their kids' college tuition.

Income gaps are the greatest since the 1920s. Since this so-called recovery began, the top 1 percent have enjoyed an 11.6 percent rise in income, not even counting capital gains, while the 99 percent has seen an income gain of just two-tenths of one percent.

Portland is not broke. We need to look not just at the city budget, but at the PDC and at "tax expenditures" -- the tax breaks we give to developers -- as well as bond issues, grants and other underwriting of sexy downtown projects -- many of which never come to fruition or have huge cost overruns. Compare those costs with the value to the vast majority of Portland's residents of everyday services: the maintenance of our parks, roads, schools and water systems; reliable bus service; quality public schools; community policing. Those are the everyday services we depend on and that make Portland livable -- all of Portland, not just downtown.

Rather than cutting some several dozen positions from park and road maintenance, rather than closing schools, cutting school programs and laying off classroom teachers, rather than cutting back bus service to the neighborhoods where it is most needed, perhaps we should revisit our city's spending priorities and our tax policies. We need to ask ourselves what kind of city we want. We pride ourselves on being "The City that Works," but we need to remember that it's the city workers who do that work. We count on them, and they need to be able to count on us.

Barbara Dudley is the senior policy adviser of the Oregon Working Families Party.